East Palestine welcomes new business with huge crowd at grand opening
Meet a woman expanding her business from a single shelf in a friend’s store to her very own shop adorned with her name.
Owner Kat Smith of Kat’s Krystals in East Palestine began working as a vendor inside her friend’s shop, Mama’s Attic.
“I actually started in one shelf of a cabinet a couple years ago, and a couple months after that, I was the whole cabinet. A couple months after that, I was a big space in front. Within about a year and a half, I was the entire front of the store. So we became popular pretty fast,” said Smith.
She described how unsure the future of East Palestine business was for owners and residents in the evacuation zone.
“There’s people in town that don’t want businesses to be open at all because they think it invites people in to get sick, and that’s a really hard thing to reconcile with. I understand it, because there are some of my neighbors who still aren’t home because the contaminated creek runs under their house. The people that are really close to the site are having a hard time; we stayed in hotels for a really long time afterwards,” said Smith. “I got chemical bronchitis from the exposure so I do definitely understand, but for us there was really not a lot of choices presented you know what I mean?”
Grand opening of Kat’s Krystals
She decided to take a chance this year and opened Kat’s Krystals on July 15 on Market Street.
“It was either this or lose our home, being able to pay [for it],” said Smith. “So there really wasn’t much of a choice and I hope that people out there understand that a lot of people are in that situation where there’s not really much choice.”
Smith said they hosted a grand opening six days after getting the keys to the building.
“I woke up that that morning, and I was just so nauseous. It was terrible. I was thinking there’s gonna be like three people that show up and it’s going to be so embarrassing,” she said.
To her delight, community members lined up down the block an hour before her shop opened to support her business.
“It was honestly amazing. We were shoulder-to-shoulder, lines out the door the whole day,” she said. “I did not expect it at all. Just shell shocked.”
She’s looking for vendors to sell their products in her shop, namely soaps, essential oils, bathing, and other items that would pair with her crystals and jewelry.
Anyone interested can call the shop or stop by when they’re open Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. and Saturday, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Smith’s thankful for her family supporting her along the way and for the East Palestine community.
“I have so many of the high school kids coming in and now even some of the high schoolers have graduated and they go away to college,” she said. ”Their friends will be like, ‘Oh my gosh, where did you get those earrings?’ Then when they come home for spring break or Thanksgiving, they have like a shopping list for their friends when they go back to college. We’re hoping one day to to have it online so people can just purchase things from out of town.”
For more information, visit Kat’s Krystals on Facebook and Instagram.
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This story was originally published July 20, 2023 at 1:19 PM.